In many TV programmes and films, even the casual science -the throwaway lines that are not essential to a plot already innocent of science – is done incompetently. It costs very little to hire a graduate student to read the script for scientific accuracy. But, so far as I can tell, this is almost never done. As a result we have such howlers as ‘parsec’ mentioned as a unit of speed instead of distance in the – in many other ways exemplary – film Star Wars. If such things were done with a modicum of care, they might even improve the plot; certainly, they might help convey a little science to a mass audience.
There’s a great deal of pseudoscience for the gullible on TV, a fair amount of medicine and technology, but hardly any science, especially on the big commercial networks, whose executives tend to think that science programming means ratings declines and lost profits, and nothing else matters. There are network employees with the title ‘Science Correspondent’, and an occasional news feature said to be devoted to science. But we almost never hear any science from them, just medicine and technology. In all the networks, I doubt if there’s a single employee whose job it is to read each week’s issue of Nature or Science to see if anything newsworthy has been discovered. When the Nobel Prizes in science are announced each fall, there’s a superb news ‘hook’ for science: a chance to explain what the prizes were given for. But, almost always, all we hear is something like ‘. . . may one day lead to a cure for cancer. Today in Belgrade . . .’
How much science is there on the radio or television talk shows, or on those dreary Sunday morning programmes in which middle-aged white people sit around agreeing with each other? When is the last time you heard an intelligent comment on science by a President of the United States? Why in all America is there no TV drama that has as its hero someone devoted to figuring out how the Universe works? When a highly publicized murder trial has everyone casually mentioning DNA testing, where are the prime-time network specials devoted to nucleic acids and heredity? I can’t even recall seeing an accurate and comprehensible description on television of how television works.
By far the most effective means of raising interest in science is television. But this enormously powerful medium is doing close to nothing to convey the joys and methods of science, while its ‘mad scientist’ engine continues to huff and puff away.
In American polls in the early 1990s, two-thirds of all adults had no idea what the ‘information superhighway’ was; 42 per cent didn’t know where Japan is; and 38 per cent were ignorant of the term ‘holocaust’. But the proportion was in the high 90s who had heard of the Menendez, Bobbit and O.J. Simpson criminal cases; 99 per cent had heard that the singer Michael Jackson had allegedly sexually molested a boy. The United States may be the best-entertained nation on Earth, but a steep price is being paid.
Surveys in Canada and the United States in the same period show that television viewers wish there were more science programming. In North America, often there’s a good science programme in the ‘Nova’ series of the Public Broadcasting System, and occasionally on the Discovery or Learning Channels, or the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Bill Nye’s ‘The Science Guy’ programmes for young children on PBS are fast-paced, feature arresting graphics, range over many realms of science, and sometimes even illuminate the process of discovery. But the depth of public interest in science engrossingly and accurately presented – to say nothing of the immense good that would result from better public understanding of science – is not yet reflected in network programming.
How could we put more science on television? Here are some possibilities:
• The wonders and methods of science routinely presented on news and talk programmes. There’s real human drama in the process of discovery.
• A series called ‘Solved Mysteries’, in which tremulous speculations have rational resolutions, including puzzling cases in forensic medicine and epidemiology.
• ‘Ring My Bells Again’ – a series in which we relive the media and the public falling hook, line and sinker for a coordinated government lie. The first two episodes might be the Bay of Tonkin ‘incident’ and the systematic irradiation of unsuspecting and unprotected American civilians and military personnel in the alleged requirements of ‘national defence’ following 1945.
• A separate series on fundamental misunderstandings and mistakes made by famous scientists, national leaders and religious figures.
• Regular exposes of pernicious pseudoscience, and audience-participation ‘how-to’ programmes: how to bend spoons, read minds, appear to foretell the future, perform psychic surgery, do cold reads, and press the TV viewers’ personal buttons. How we’re bamboozled: learn by doing.
• A state-of-the-art computer graphics facility to prepare in advance scientific visuals for a wide range of news contingencies.
• A set of inexpensive televised debates, each perhaps an hour long, with a computer graphics budget for each side provided by the producers, rigorous standards of evidence required by the moderator, and the widest range of topics broached. They could address issues where the scientific evidence is overwhelming, as on the matter of the shape of the Earth; controversial matters where the answer is less clear, such as the survival of one’s personality after death, or abortion, or animal rights, or genetic engineering; or any of the presumptive pseudosciences mentioned in this book.
There is a pressing national need for more public knowledge of science. Television cannot provide it all by itself. But if we want to make short-term improvements in the understanding of science, television is the place to start.
23
Maxwell and The Nerds
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
Ronald Reagan,
campaign speech, 1980
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
George Washington,
address to Congress, 8 January 1790
Stereotypes abound. Ethnic groups are stereotyped, the citizens of other nations and religions are stereotyped, the genders and sexual preferences are stereotyped, people born in various times of the year are stereotyped (Sun-sign astrology), and occupations are stereotyped. The most generous interpretation ascribes it to a kind of intellectual laziness: instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes.
This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if stereotyping were valid on average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases: human variation runs to bell-type curves. There’s an average value of any quality, and smaller numbers of people running off in both extremes.
Some stereotyping is the result of not controlling the variables, of forgetting what other factors might be in play. For example, it used to be that there were almost no women in science. Many male scientists were vehement: this proved that women lacked the ability to do science. Temperamentally, it didn’t fit them, it was too difficult, it required a kind of intelligence that women don’t have, they’re too emotional to be objective, can you think of any great women theoretical physicists? . . . and so on. Since then the barriers have come tumbling down. Today women populate most of the subdisciplines of science. In my own fields of astronomy and planetary studies, women have recently burst upon the scene, making discovery after discovery, and providing a desperately needed breath of fresh air.
So what data were they missing, all those famous male scientists of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier who had pronounced so authoritatively on the intellectual deficiencies of women? Plainly, society was preventing women from entering science, and then criticizing them for it, confusing cause and effect:
You want to be an astronomer, young woman? Sorry.
Why can’t you? Because you’re unsuited.
How do we know you’re unsuited? Because women have never been astronomers.
Put so baldly, the case sounds absurd. But the contrivances of bias can be subtle. The despised group is rejected by spurious arguments, sometimes done with such confidence and contempt that many of us, including some of the victims themselves, fail to recognize it as self-serving sleight of hand.
Casual observers of meetings of sceptics, and those who glance at the list of CSICOP Fellows, have noted a great preponderance of men. Others claim disproportionate numbers of women among believers in astrology (horoscopes in most ‘women’s’ but few ‘men’s’ magazines), crystals, ESP and the like. Some commentators suggest that there is something peculiarly male about scepticism. It’s hard-driving, competitive, confrontational, tough-minded – whereas women, they say, are more accepting, consensus-building, and uninterested in challenging conventional wisdom. But in my experience women scientists have just as finely honed sceptical senses as their male counterparts; that’s just part of being a scientist. This criticism, if that’s what it is, is presented to the world in the usual ragged disguise: if you discourage women from being sceptical and don’t train them in scepticism, then sure enough you may find that many women aren’t sceptical. Open the doors and let them in, and they’re as sceptical as anybody else.